Ger Lane: Cork footballers will ditch tactic of naming dummy teams

Cork chairman Ger Lane is to instruct football manager Peadar Healy to end the practice of naming dummy teams.

Lane was responding to comments from Passage delegate Matt Ahern at Sunday’s county convention, with the latter claiming it was disrespectful to “the small band of Cork football supporters” to put out a team on match-day that bore little resemblance to the one named in advance.

In what was to prove their last outing of this year’s championship, the Cork team that lined out against Donegal in the fourth round qualifier showed three changes to the team announced 24-hours earlier.

“I don’t know who we are fooling. Our neighbours across the border don’t bother with this,” said Ahern. Lane disagrees with the practice and promised to speak with the various management teams in advance of next year’s competitions. “I think it is important we lay out our team and play it more or less as it is named,” Lane said.

“It is something we will certainly speak to our management teams about. It is something that should be adhered to, by and large. There is no advantage anymore to naming dummy teams. Everybody knows who’s playing. I think it is something we should get back to doing across all our teams.”

The chairman also revealed his intention to sit down with managers and discuss the thorny issue of inter-county players not being released back to their clubs. “Too often, we have players not playing with their club when they could easily be playing with their club. We want to ensure our managements are not holding these players back.

“We hear all different stories about players not being allowed play [with their club] for a variety of reasons. We want our players to play with their clubs. Sometimes players don’t always tell the truth in relation to not being available. We need to find where the truth is, but we do want to see players who are sitting on the bench with Cork in an away national league fixture and have no chance of getting a game playing with their club. We want to try and ensure that that is improved.

“We intend meeting our managements to hammer home that message.”